Standard e-mail etiquette is pretty obvious to most of us and if you’re good at it, you’ll get your point across more often without stepping on toes or causing unneeded confusion. Simple things like identifying yourself well, avoiding sarcasm and adding context to statements are all extremely beneficial. However, writing e-mails to highly technical developers, system administrators, and engineers is a little trickier. These types of e-mail recipients don’t really enjoy handling e-mail (inbound or outbound) and most find that e-mail is just a speed bump which interrupts their productivity.
If you’re not technical, you might be asking yourself: “I need to e-mail technical people and they need to take what I say seriously? How do I do it?” It’s not impossible, but the rest of this blog post should help.